January 2014

Although it's called the Skidmore Passivhaus, I might have named this home and workplace for architect Jeff Stern and his wife, artist Karen Thurman, the Yin-Yang House for its inherent balance.

As its name suggest, the home, designed by Stern's firm, In Situ Architecture, meets Passive House standards for energy efficiency, yet these added costs are offset by a series of architectural and material choices that also give Stern and Thurman's home an industrial-chic sense of style.

The design also creates an ingenious balance between home and work spaces. As I can personally attest, working from home often makes one desire some kind of demarcation between domestic and vocational spaces without actually renting work space at a remote location. With the Skidmore Passivhaus, Stern created two separate architectural boxes, a single-story one for the two studios and then a two-story, one-bedroom main house. The two boxes are free-standing from one another yet connected with a translucent awning and a continuation of the back yard's elegant mahogany decking. (That's right: the outdoor decking is a more luxurious material than the indoor concrete floors.)

Between the boxes (photo by Jeremy Bitterman)

Standing in this covered connecting zone felt a little like being in a Rummer house of yesteryear, where one is staring at exterior cladding within an interior space. It's blurring the borders between indoor and outdoor. And because the home interior is completely white, and the wood-clad exterior stained a dark ebony, it emphasizes a demarcation point where Stern and Thurman can leave work and walk just a few steps into a space that feels markedly different.

"Way back when we conceived of it we thought about this more literally being an outdoor space," explains Stern, who previously worked for Portland's Opsis Architecture before forming his own firm. "Then we kind of got wise about the weather. We didn’t want to literally go outside but we wanted to keep that feel."

Passive House design is about creating a thermos-like environment that's well insulated and completely air-tight. So Stern and Thurman devoted an increased percentage of their budget to high-end windows (overwhelmingly south-facing with minimum glazing to the east and west) and mechanized exterior shades that keep out unwanted summertime heat. Though Thurman enjoys leaving the shades open out of an affinity for warm temperatures, Stern says last summer during the biggest heat waves, the house would maintain interior temperatures in the low 70s when they closed the shades in the morning. "Some people thought we had air conditioning when they walked in," he remembers.

Stairway and living area (photos by Jeremy Bitterman)

In the winter, the house has remained toasty even though it relies on only four small wall-mounted electric heaters. "It's the equivalent of four hair driers and yet we were perfectly comfortable," the architect adds.

While vastly reduced energy bills (versus a house designed to code) help offset the added cost of meeting Passive House standards, Stern's design also makes use of affordable and materials in a way that doesn't compromise the aesthetics. In fact, it forms them. Bifurcating the living room from the kitchen, for example, is a stairway made from folded steel. The floors are concrete, which helps the home hold its thermal mass. The kitchen counter is made from plastic laminate and the cupboards are made of plywood, while the upstairs bedroom counter from poured concrete. Doors and other surfaces are often cast in bold primary colors that give the industrial feel of the concrete and steel a nice touch of whimsy.

Above: Kitchen; below: bedroom (photos by Jeremy Bitterman)

Stern's design also creates a nice balance between loft-like openness and closed-door intimacy. Like a loft, the house places a bedroom above the kitchen but keeps the living room double-height. The bedroom looks down like a balcony onto the living area, but instead of keeping the bedroom open, Stern placed an interior window there as well as a pocket door at the top of the adjacent stairway.

As a result, the bedroom receives the natural light pouring into the living room, but a greater sense of privacy. When I stood at the top of the stairs beside the bedroom, I could literally hear my speaking voice create two sets of acoustic conditions, carrying almost echo-like into the living area below but resonating warmly in the bedroom. I've often wondered how two people living in a loft could live with having a bedroom share acoustics with a living room. This solution finds a yin-yang of privacy and light: like much of the house, it's the best of both worlds.

Over the past decade and a half many of Portland's most compelling office projects have been renovations of former industrial spaces and warehouses. Allied Works' Wieden + Kennedy building, for example, transformed a former cold-storage warehouse. Boora's design for Adidas’s American headquarters took advantage the former Bess Kaiser hospital. GBD Architects and Ankrom Moisan designed a renovation of the old Meier & Frank Delivery Depot for Vestas. Works Partnership re-imagined the Olympic Mills Commerce Center. Each project may have started with a good location and ample square footage, but the resulting architectural experience became an important part of the building occupants’ DNA. They all resisted suburban office parks and paid more to give their employees a better sense of place inside and out, and it paid off.

The new THA Architecture-designed home of Downstream, the local company formerly known for video postproduction but now a multidisciplinary designer of branded environments (with a staff of architects, graphic designers, writers and software engineers involved with nearly every project), falls squarely in that tradition.

Downstream and THA initially planned to build an entirely new building, also in close-in Northwest Portland. They even won a 2012 AIA/Portland Design Award for those unbuilt designs. But the company only needed two out of its five stories, and ultimately decided being a landlord would distract Downstream from its burgeoning core business. Instead, the company (with THA's consultation) decided to renovate a two-story warehouse at NW 16th and Johnson.

Though ideally located along border between the Pearl District and Northwest Portland (with downtown also close by), the building keeps a low profile from the outside rather than shouting any architectural ambitions. Viewed from the street, it’s not that different-looking from any of the other warehouses nearby, minus the forklifts moving in and out. But despite a much smaller per-square-foot budget, the interior is recalls the masterful Wieden + Kennedy design, which THA principal Corey Martin worked on earlier in his career while an employee at Allied Works.

The Downstream headquarters is comprised of two large, wide-open central spaces, around which a series of smaller enclaves (glass-enclosed bigwig offices, conference rooms) collect and sometimes overlap, with the design maintaining an economy of materials—concrete, glass, white oak—that unifies the interior.

“It’s at once very open and dynamic but also humane and scaled in a way that feels like you can work in it,” Martin said in a recent conversation. “There’s these shifting spaces offset from each other and shifting planes to create different sense of enclosure. Some of the studio spaces and offices feel private, and then as you get more into the middle you feel more open and connected and centralized.” Indeed, walk into the far west portion of the office and the wide-open volume is compelling. Yet in other spaces one feels enclosure and intimacy. It's a nice balance.

Offices in general have transformed over the last generation, with many companies, especially creative-industry ones, minimizing the size and footprint of individual workstations in order to create more and larger communal areas. You may not have as big a cubicle, or even have a cubicle at all, the thinking goes, but there’s a large kitchen and dining area, and plenty of places for your team to gather together and pin ideas on the wall.

Downstream's dining area and workstations (photos by Brian Libby)

“It does foster collaboration for a design firm,” explained Downstream CEO Tim Canfield during a recent building tour. “In our old office you’d have to go down the hall and talk to this person and then go back down the hall. You really couldn’t work together.”

In the new office, he adds, “These guys have their rally caps on and are working together to meet a deadline. They’re pinning ideas onto the wall. Then they go next door together and have a couple of beers and play pool. It’s this beehive of energy with everybody working toward the same goal. That never happened at the old office. You can see there’s energy. It’s a quiet energy but things are happening.”

Martin actually made pin-up space for collaborative areas a priority. “It’s a challenge to create something that provides enough daylight but includes enough pinup or wall space, and yet when you’re working with visual imagery like Downstream, or like an architect, you need that,” he explains. “Usually you have a perimeter of windows, and if your interior is completely open, that doesn’t leave many other walls. We have that problem in our office. But “Downstream’s space a perfect place for visual design.”

THA’s plan places the employee dining room (which the company stocks with sandwich fixings and cold drinks) and two conference rooms along the 16th avenue and Johnson Street perimeters so everyone can enjoy the views outside, yet thanks to rooftop sawtooth skylights, there is a bounty of illumination, even though the other two sides of the building are (because they border on other buildings) without windows.

Small details also bring out personality. That employee dining room, for instance, has a long family-style table with a tree growing out of the middle. A glass conference room table has as its base an all but obsolete film transfer machine that used to be the company’s core business. There’s even still a film cued up.

In recent years Downstream has become a world-class designer of interactive audio-visual environments, and in the center of the new headquarters is a mural-sized video screen that comprises both one of the headquarters’ highlights and its most incomplete setting. By touching different visual prompts on the screen, as Canfield demonstrated impressively on my visit, one can bring up any number of stories about Downstream’s work, be it displays of basketball-team heritage at the University of Oregon’s Matthew Knight Arena or the story of a German octogenarian making headlines as a long-distance runner. Once devoted to technical tasks like color-correcting film or transferring it to video, Downstream now possesses an altogether more imaginative grasp of how audio-video tools can be fused with interior environments to create memorable and unique experiences. Which the video wall ably demonstrates.

But this impressive interactive display is paired with a small cluster of circular tables and chairs. It’s the only part of the Downstream space that doesn’t feel completely resolved. It seems to want to be the company’s living room but the furniture is more like a break room by rote. Still, it's probably a few good sofas away from an enlivening experience.

By no means, though, should this minor quibble distract from the rest of the Downstream headquarters design. Like Wieden + Kennedy and Vestas, it's a company headquarters that successfully communicates good values: a commitment to first-rate local talent, to urban infill and embracing density, and finding ways to make volume and materials sing with a relatively modest budget.

The project also continues a string of successful designs for THA in an era when its esteemed founder, Thomas Hacker, has increasingly given the design reigns to other principals; most architecture firms based around a unique talent have a difficult time transitioning to a new generation, but THA is thriving. In that way, the archtitecture firm, its client and the building itself make a good match. They're all transforming in a way that, while not shouting about itself from the rooftops, is impressive to behold.

Our latest talk with local architects about their inspirations, career and favorites leads us to a founding principal of Merryman Barnes Architects: Nancy Merryman. A past president of AIA/Portland, Merryman has long been active both as an architect and in the community. Her firm, founded in 1992 (and known until 2008 as Robertson Merryman Barnes), has designed a variety of project types from mixed-use and multifamily housing to religious facilities to parks and civic structures.

Portland Architecture: When did you first become interested in architecture as a possible career?

Nancy Merryman: Growing up in Klamath Falls, I loved buildings. Thinking about it now, I guess I could say I had a rich architectural environment as a kid. I was fortunate enough to see lots of interesting examples of architecture close to home. And I was able to travel some with my parents. I totally fell in love with Greece.

I have a relative named Ned Livingston who lives on a beautiful ranch 60 miles from town. I didn’t know anything about architecture at the time I first knew him, but I always admired him and thought he was cool. He trained to be an architect at the University of Oregon; the principals of the San Francisco firm Backen, Arrigoni & Ross were some of his friends and contemporaries. He worked for a while and got his architectural license then decided one day that he hated the practice of architecture. (I should have asked him a lot more about that at the time!) He then became a furniture maker and designed and made beautiful, handcrafted teak wood furniture. One of his pieces is a freestanding library stepladder, now in the Smithsonian collection. Also, Carole King bought one of his amazing cradles; it looks like a Viking ship. He also built every part of his house by hand. Ned and I didn’t talk too much about architecture when I was a kid, but he is one of the reasons I became interested in design. I was always interested in buildings and traveling to see buildings, but nobody had ever talked to me about architecture as a profession at that time.

Another early memory is my best friend, on another cattle ranch; her house was built in the 1850s. It had a stream running through the stone basement, a unique cold storage pantry area with very thick walls in the stone part of the house directly adjacent to the kitchen, and the upstairs had a continuous space below the eaves connecting all the bedroom closets. Great for pranks, and home to Louis, the resident ghost. Also, my next-door neighbors had a 1957 architect-designed house. We lived in a mid‑century modern builder house not done by an architect. As a result, those two houses had a deep impact on my interest in architecture because they were so well built and wonderful to live in, with the light and the way the spaces flowed together, spacious and cozy at the same time.

Where did you study architecture and how would you rate the experience?

I started out in pre-med for two years at the University of Oregon. The turning point came while I was taking organic chemistry. One of my friends was in architecture school, and I would somehow find myself staying up until 2 a.m. talking to her about her architecture projects instead of studying my organic chemistry. She was on the selection committee that year and encouraged me to apply, and that’s when I switched into architecture as a career path. I remember asking my mom to send me a suitcase full of my drawings from under my bed at home for the application materials. Those were the old days!

It was a fabulous education. Architecture provides a brilliant liberal arts background because you study science and art and history as well as math. It’s a very well-rounded discipline for analyzing and solving problems.

I was lucky to be at the U of O during a really good time. There were wonderful professors like Gary Moye and Thomas Hacker and Pat Piccioni, who had all worked for Louis Kahn in Philadelphia. Gary Moye and Don Genasci were amazing mentors to me. I also had Thom Hacker as a reviewer and media class instructor. Earl Morsund and his spatial composition class was a revelation.

Bill Kleinsasser also taught at the U of O during my time there. He came from Berkeley and was a major proponent of the Pattern Language. Instead of being at one school where everybody was thinking the same way, U of O offered real power in the form of an education that allowed me to experience multiple architectural philosophies at once: it’s not all Pattern Language, it’s not all Khanian, and it’s not all Mies, for example. U of O provided a nuanced learning environment where I found real value in discovering that I could make thoroughly informed choices and develop my own set of values.

Don Genasci was also important to me because he taught me how to understand urban environments, the designs of cities, and the reasons quality design and development of the public realm are so critical. The summer I spent in London with him was one of the high points of my education.

I should mention that there were also a lot of amazing students there too! I learned almost as much about design and drawing from people like Ken Klos, Mark Foster, and many others.

I started at Boora Architects right after graduation and worked there for 11 years. At Boora, I worked on the Portland Center for the Performing Arts, an amazing project. It was a competition, and I was able to work on the submission and then work on the project all the way through construction documents. The Newmark Theater was my main focus on the project. Today, I can walk by the Schnitzer and say, “I chose those colors.” Not the interior ones—that’s a whole other story! I also worked on the First Congregational church remodel on the same block as the Performing Arts Center. Those were my favorite projects at Boora.

More recently, (at Merryman Barnes Architects) we worked with the Sisters of the Holy Names to design an archive building for their order, called the Heritage Center. This fascinating group of women are among our all-time favorite clients. Their project also includes a beautiful garden designed by Mayer Reed. Their original Provincial House headquarters is now part of the Mary’s Woods Retirement Community, directly adjacent to the campus of Marylhurst College, which the Sisters founded. The Heritage Center has a very classical form that was meant to relate to the Provincial House and its architectural character.

So much of the pleasure of architectural practice depends on the client. We recently finished a new Catholic church in Portland called San Juan Diego. The parish members, along with the building itself, made this an especially rewarding project. We got the project in 2003, two weeks before the archdiocese declared bankruptcy! The project went on hold for five years and then finally came back to life. We started working on programming and, little by little, the design evolved. It was completed in November 2010.

Gary Moye, as I mentioned, was a fabulous professor who I also worked for during school. At Boora, Bud Oringdulph was always a mentor to me as were other principals including Tom Pene and Stan Boles. Truthfully, I wish I had had more real mentors. When we started Merryman Barnes Architects, I quickly realized just how much I didn’t know about so many things. But I enjoy a collegial group of friends and professionals who are always willing to share information and inspiration. And MB’s been especially lucky because some of our current work has come to the firm through other architects’ recommendations.

What part of the job do you like best, and as an architect what do you think you most excel at?

I think I listen well and make a point of really understanding what a client wants. That’s the fun part, eliciting the client’s needs. Figuring out how things have to work functionally is one aspect of the work; another is discovering the client’s hopes and dreams on top of the project’s functionality. I really enjoy helping the clients figure out the character of their spaces, and how their choices will affect their daily lives, whether at home or at work. It’s rewarding and fun to get to know people in that way.

I love working with clients but to a certain extent, like most architects, I’m pretty much an introvert, so I also love sitting at my desk thinking about design or daydreaming about the projects.

What are some Portland buildings (either new or historic) that you most admire?

I tend to like architecture that manages to be grand and understated at the same time. Something a bit formal, but warm and well-scaled.

The Town Club, right above the MAC Club on Salmon Street, has the form of an Italian palazzo; the building sits tight to the sidewalk, and has a gracious brick arch marking the main entry. The brick continues past the building as a low brick wall that encircles a sunken garden in the rear of the site. I love this kind of architectural fabric. It is urban, and it has a certain mystery about it.

Portland Town Club (image via thetownclub.org)

I still like the Performing Arts Center, especially the way it fits around the First Congregational Church. I also like Holst’s Bud Clark Commons. I’ve always admired the sculptural qualities and materiality of the Hatfield Federal Courthouse. And I expect to love Kengo Kuma’s new work for the Portland Japanese Garden!

What is your favorite building outside of Portland and besides any you’ve worked on?

I love the Soane Museum in London. It’s totally eccentric and enchanting. Soane took two old townhouses and broke through the common walls to join them horizontally and then also made floor-to-floor connections to link spaces vertically. The museum has all kinds of 3D spaces, including a picture gallery room whose walls are moveable panels full of paintings – you keep peeling back the panels until all of a sudden they open into space and you can look down into the sculpture court at Soane’s collection of marble statues and other antiquities. Light comes from the top and somehow makes it all the way down to the lowest level. Soane also designed the wonderful Dulwich Picture Gallery, which has beautiful interior spaces. I learned about Soane from Don Genasci and the summer I spent in London.

Is there a local architect or firm you think is unheralded or deserves more credit?

I’m sure there are dozens who deserve more credit—we are blessed with an abundance of talented architects. Some friends that come to mind immediately are Richard Brown, Liz Williams, Rick Potestio, Bill Tripp, Ken Klos, Giulietti/Schouten, Chris Diloreto…I know I’m forgetting many whose work I have admired.

Bill’s Packer House is gorgeous. When he took me to see it last year, I was thrilled to see so many Aalto characteristics. It’s a big house, but all of the rooms feel cozy thanks to his close attention to scale, light and detail.

What would you like to see change about Portland’s built environment in the long term?

I hope Portland is able to keep and/or encourage a lot more smaller-scale development. That’s what makes the neighborhoods like Mississippi, Alberta, Hawthorne, and Division so lively. I understand that there is huge pressure to keep increasing the density of the city—I just hope we can strike a balance that allows both smaller and larger projects. I think the huge scale of development in many places is really deadly to the life and public nature of a city. I also hope, along with Susan Anderson, that the growth and development can move east to improve parts of the city that have been neglected too long.

We’re lucky to be kind of provincial, so growth has been slower here; we didn’t get as many bad buildings as Seattle during the boom. Anytime a firm gets a building in Portland, it’s special, and it’s a big deal, so a lot of time and attention go into it. I hope that trend continues.

I’ve enjoyed Ankrom Moisan’s work in the Pearl. I think these well-detailed “fabric” buildings will stand the tests of time. I hope we keep the pedestrian scale and the urban fabric because I think the city itself—the spaces we create within the city—define our quality of life, and our relationships with our environment. It’s important to have beautiful buildings that are done well, but I don’t want them to all be “icons,” although everyone seems to crave that kind of attention in our commercialized culture. It’s tough on people when buildings are designed only to get attention.

San Juan Diego (photo courtesy Merryman Barnes Architects)

How would you rate the performance of local government like the Portland Development Commission, or the development and planning bureaus?

I was on Portland’s Design Commission for eight years, so I understand that you can’t create good design through a bureaucratic process. But what you can do is encourage the clients and architect teams to consider other options, make better choices, do a better job. I think the city commissions and bureaus have tried to encourage people to do the right thing in a positive way.

I know the city has gotten some bad raps for being tough to work with, but that hasn’t been our experience. MB has productive ongoing relationships with planners and examiners. We start communicating at the beginning of a project to fully understand their goals and perspectives. It’s a hard position to be in! The city staff is answerable to many different private and public entities, all with varying levels of sophistication and knowledge about the city, and trying to achieve a dual vision of sustainability and quality design. It is a tall order! But I’m glad we have high expectations.

I think Portland has been blessed to have the Portland Development Commission. I feel sorry that it has changed its focus to economic development instead of its traditional role as a planning and development engine. Creating a vibrant city takes work in both areas and I’m not certain who will be leading the more physical aspects. I have lots of architect friends who went to work there and were instrumental in doing planning for many different neighborhoods. We have also done many studies for PDC, imagining the potential of various properties. All of that work is really important in order to be able to show people what is possible from a very physical standpoint. It seems that there are not as many of those types of explorations being done, and that’s a real loss. I understand the focus on jobs and how important that is along with sustainability, but I also think that the physical design elements should not be overlooked.

Who is a famous architect you’d like to see design a building in Portland?

I’ve enjoyed Peter Zumthor’s work and I’d love to see something by him in Portland. One of my favorites is the museum in Cologne, Germany where he uses part of a ruin as the entrance into an amazing museum complex. I remember thinking that it was gorgeous. I was working on a church project at the time and I thought, “I want to see how much this project cost to build per square foot,” and it was something like $1,500. Needless to say, we didn’t have the same level of budget.

I also love the oval St. Benedict’s chapel that he did in Switzerland where the interior roof structure looks like the structure of a boat; a beautiful, tiny project.

I really respect people that can do beautiful work with small budgets like the Rural Studio, and others who take on the affordable housing challenge. One of our philosophies is that everybody deserves a beautiful place to live and it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the cost or the materials. With today’s codes, affordable housing has the same requirements for energy, structure, seismic, and other considerations that a custom residential house would have. The beauty of either type of housing comes through its appropriate siting, the proportions, the layout of the spaces, how natural light comes it and other experiential aspects of design. Those are much more important than the granite countertops, for example.

I’ve seen houses in ideal settings, with every luxurious material, with a beautiful view and high ceilings - and yet there is nothing there that elicits any real emotional response. You have to be careful about scale; I have a problem with a lot of the architecture I see in the magazines. It is visually stunning and interesting, but when I try to imagine myself in that space, I wonder how I would feel and where I would hang out. I am a real humanist in that sense, because I’m always trying to consider the human response and there is a lot of stuff out there that doesn’t appear to.

I have a whole collection of Mexican Oaxacan folk art animal carvings, but now I’m very picky about which ones I buy. I also love pottery, especially Italian, Spanish, and Mexican versions. I also enjoy furniture, but I have way too much of it.

I wondered, after I made my list: what do all of these have in common? I think they share a theme of stepping outside your normal life and routine, doing something else, being somewhere else, being another version of yourself - and being enriched from the experiences. They are all basically positive about life. Which suits me. I know I’m supposed to say "Blade Runner," "Belly of an Architect," "The Draughtsman’s Contract," or something edgy like that.

After a four-week hiatus bookending the holidays, our design calendar is back.

Architects Without BordersThe Oregon chapter of Architects Without Borders' monthly meeting will feature a presentation on designing for disability in the developing world. Copeland Downs, architecture student at the University of Oregon (Portland campus), will describe his experiences in Ethiopia working with the nonprofit Ethiopian Center for Disability and Development. The meeting will also introduce a new AWB-Oregon focus on the issue of homelessness. AIA Center for Architecture, 403 NW 11th Avenue. 6pm Wednesday, January 22. Free.

William Deresiewicz The MFA in Applied Craft in Design program, jointly operated by the Pacific NW College of Art and the Oregon College of Art & Craft, presents a talk by Deresiewicz, a contributing writer for The Nation and a contributing editor for The New Republic and The American Scholar, devoted to creative entrepreneurship as political practice. Bison Building, 421 NE 10th Avenue. 6:30pm Wednesday, January 22. Free.

Walker Templeton: Creating a New Center of CampusA lecture by Walker Templeton, will focus on designing the renovation and addition of the University of Oregon's Erb Memorial Union with a focus on working with large user groups and integrated sustainable design. University of Oregon, White Stag Block, 70 NW Couch Street. 5:30pm Wednesday, January 22. Free.

Portland 101: Crooked Grids, Tiny Blocks, and the Building of the City How did Portland get this way, with its little square blocks and weird intersections, the funny pronunciations and the bridge ramps to nowhere? Why is it even located where it is? Robert Jordan will guide attendees through 150 years of Portland’s development including stone carvers’ mistakes, upside-down pineapples, mythical tunnels, the naming and re-naming of our streets, and the eras of commercial architecture that have marked our compact and vibrant downtown, as well as the near blitzkrieg effect of the Great Demolition which left us with parking lots where the temples of finance and industry once stood. Architectural Heritage Center, 701 SE Grand Avenue. 10am Saturday, January 25. $20 ($12 for AHC members).

"The Monster Builder" Playwright Amy Freed, a Pulitzer Prize finalists, premieres her new play, a comedy based loosely on Goethe's "Faust," about an egomaniacal “starchitect” called Gregor Zubrowski. "His commanding presence and curious creative process both titillate and manipulate design professionals and patrons alike into submission," the theater's website explains. "After he casually steals a career-making project, two fledgling architects dare to challenge this monster-builder at his own game." Artists Repertory Theater, 1515 SW Morrison Street. Premieres 7:30pm Friday, January 28, continuing through March 2 with performances Wednesdays through Sunday at 7:30pm and Sundays at 2pm. $25.

In late December, construction equipment began returning to the gaping hole in downtown Portland that has sat empty for nearly five years between Southwest Morrison and Yamhill Streets between Park and Ninth Avenues.

Yes, work is finally resuming on what one might call the “Momma Bear” solution for what is intended to be developer Tom Moyer’s iconic vision for an iconic high-rise retail, office and residential tower in the heart of Portland. Back in 2007, just as Moyer was beginning to slip into the haze of dementia, his development team completed plans for a 33-story slender tower with offices, retail and condos.

Work stopped with the crash of the condo market, and in 2009 the Moyer team returned with the “Baby Bear” version – 26 stories with retail, offices and no condos. The cutback had to be painful for Robert Thompson and the design team at TVA Architects, who were rightfully proud of the sculptural, slender tower that they intended to be a new landmark on the city skyline. Yet even without the condos, leasing for the Baby Bear stalled and the big hole in the ground sat silent and vacant.

“It was kind of the poster child for the recession period,” Thompson said, when he returned to the Portland Design Commission recently with the Momma Bear version. “Obviously, it was heartbreaking for everyone when it came to a halt in 2009.” Most of the heartbreak is over; the third and presumably final version of Park Avenue West rises 30 stories. At 460 feet tall, it falls only 16 feet short of the original design. A slender spire approved as part of the project will push its tip just past 500 feet.

Park Avenue West (rendering courtesy TVA Architects)

The exterior of Park Avenue West looks much like the two earlier versions – and is essentially identical to the 26-story "Baby Bear" design with four floors added below the canted roof that shrouds mechanical equipment. In the latest plan, 15 stories comprising 203 apartments will sit atop the bottom two floors of retail, and 13 stories of office space will sit above the apartments. In the first 2007 design, the condos took the highest floors and sat atop the officer space. With the collapse of the high-end condo market, office space pays a better premium for what Thompson called “the views and everything about being up high.” In all, it is a busy formula for a block that, at 100 feet by 200 feet, is only half the size of a normal downtown block.

Stoel Rives, the large Portland law firm, has leased nine of the 13 office floors in Park Avenue West, including the top two “penthouse” floors. The Stoel Rives lease and the hot Portland apartment market were key factors in reviving Park Avenue West, which is now scheduled to be completed in 2016. “We are bringing back 203 apartment units that will add to energy and activation of the project at night,” Thompson said.

The unusual height of the tower relates back to a grand scheme negotiated by Moyer many years ago. After another developer caused a controversy by proposing a multi-story parking garage on a surface parking lot now known as Director Park, Moyer bought the parking block. He said he would give the surface of that block to the city in return for the right to build parking below it, and to transfer the above-ground development rights to the block that will be home to Park Avenue West on the block immediately north. The City Council agreed.

Since then, the Portland Parks Bureau pursued an elaborate design process that led to development of Director Park. Though certainly less well-known than Pioneer Courthouse Square, the slender park with its hardscape surface and multiple public uses will grow in esteem as time goes on. Park Avenue West strives to create an attractive northern face to the park by fronting it with a glassy, 35-foot façade that includes the entry to the tower’s residential floors.

A version of Park Avenue West from 2010 (rendering courtesy TVA Architects)

The tower’s two-story pedestal offers retail on both floors, and does its best to provide pedestrian engagement on all four sides. “Everything we’re trying to do is energize the ground plane,” Thompson told the Design Commission. The entrance to the upper-story offices will be off Southwest Ninth Avenue, and automobile access to the underground parking will be off Park Avenue.

An unusual attribute of the tower site is the presence of low-rise buildings – or no buildings – all the way to the Willamette River. Thompson noted that the slender building “fills a void in the skyline.” True – but it also offers an outstanding view for tenants with east-facing windows that likely will remain unblocked for decades.

The Momma Bear version sailed breezily through Design Commission deliberations Jeff Stuhr, a partner in Holst Architecture who was a commission member during the first go-round, wrote in to call the project “critical to the continued success of downtown.” The city’s Bureau of Development Services staff report that recommended approval spoke in glowing terms for a government report. At one point, it referred to 30 years of downtown planning and called the building “exactly what the Central City Plan describes” for the heart of downtown. Other laudatory staff comments referred to the building as an "elegant point tower," and said it "helps to define Portland’s skyline and can become a landmark in the skyline – it will be distinctive and exuberant.”

There is no building in Portland or perhaps even the United States that is at once so important and so poorly done, so eye-catchingly unique and so ridiculous, so historic and so in need of substantial alteration. What to do with the Portland Building?

As reported by The Oregonian's Brad Schmidt a few days ago, Portland City Council members, faced with $95 million in repairs necessary to fix water damage and structural damage to the Portland Building, have openly considered razing it.

Even besides the huge cost to repair the Portland Building, there are other problems inherent to the Michael Graves-designed city administrative center. In a cloudy climate, its windows are extra small. Employees working there have higher rates of sick days than those working in other city buildings.

“My reaction is we should basically tear it down and build something new,” Council member Dan Saltzman told Schmidt, calling the Portland Building “a nightmare for people who work there.”

“There’s got to be a better option than putting another $100 million into a white elephant,” added Council member Nick Fish. Saltzman and Fish's fellow councilor, Steve Novick, proposed that a new home be built that could house both Multnomah County's courts (the nearby courthouse, while historic, is aging) and city of Portland administrative offices now housed in the Portland Building.

In many ways, their arguments make sense. Any other city administrative building that, at just 32 years of age, needed $95 million in repairs but even then would be a cheaply constructed place with dreary lightless interiors and a terrible street presence would likely be demolished.

But the Portland building is also very historically significant, not just in a local or national but even in an international context. It's the first major work of postmodern architecture in the United States. Any time a city tears down such historically significant architecture, it's a draconian act.

At the time of its completion in 1982, public buildings and corporate offices alike were almost always modern, and modernism by the early 1980s had become an ugly version of itself: all concrete brutalism and reflective glass facades. The Portland Building, along with Philip Johnson's AT&T Building in New York (completed just afterward), ushered in an entirely new era in world architecture: one that eschewed modernism's deliberate ignorance of the past and embraced historical forms. The Portland Building also stood out markedly for its color and whimsy, its peach-toned facade festooned with red garlands.

The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places last year, an honor usually reserved for buildings 50 years or older. That it was accepted at 32 is an indication of its significance, not just to Portland but to the world.

"Younger architects may not grasp how radical Graves’ design for the Portland Building appeared when it was first unveiled during the course of the competition," writes Eugene architect Randy Nishimura on his blog. "His highly personal design vocabulary fundamentally strayed from the principles and orthodoxy of modernism, which since WWII had established itself as the architectural doctrine of choice for large institutional and commercial projects. Graves employed color and grossly over-scaled classical elements (keystones, pilasters, garlands, etc.) in an unabashedly symbolic way. The Portland Building’s design overtly acknowledged the power of architecture to communicate meaning."

Indeed, I often describe the Portland Building as the architectural equivalent of Andy Warhol's Brillo-box sculptures or prints of Campbell's soup cans: a whimsical deconstruction. But such irony may work better in the visual arts than it does on an administrative building that needs to stand the test of time.

I also often describe the Portland Building as a kind of noble failure. When it was completed, then-mayor Frank Ivancie was quoted as saying that this would be Portland's Eiffel Tower: a world-renowned landmark that would emblemize the city. It didn't quite turn out that way, but while our city has an exceptionally talented roster of architects and firms, I think of the Portland buiding as a design that aspired to a home run but struck out in a city of buildings that go for singles and usually get on base.

In other words, while there's no doubt the Portland Building is flawed, one can see Graves aspire to greatness. You can feel not only the whimsy but the audaciousness. Portland buildings, even the best ones, are normally never audacious. In a certain way, it's precisely the ridiculousness of this building that becomes its best quality.

"What appeared beguiling and nuanced in the competition renderings would be realized as a grossly unrefined, miserable, squat box of a building. Regardless, its significance as a piece of architecture cannot be understated," Nishimura adds. "For this reason alone, I believe the Portland Building and its salient features are worthy of preservation. This is easy for me to say: I don’t have to come up with the money to properly repair and refurbish it."

I'm not going to argue that the city should simply spend the $95 million and restore the building as is. But I'm certainly not going to join those calling for it to be torn down. I'd rather see a compromise, although it might cost more: transform the building but keep its historic facade. What if, for example, a new design cut a hole in the roof to allow a massive atrium?

One way or another, the city is going to have to spend money, either on the Portland Building or on its replacement. Does it have to be an either/or proposition? Do we have only the options to destroy an internationally renowned building in a way that would taint Portland's reputation as a steward of history or to sink $95 million into the building without addressing its shortcomings? Perhaps there is a third way.

Even among architects the building lacks consensus on whether it should live or die. Architects Becca Cavell (of THA Architecture) and Peter Meijer (who wrote the building's National Register listing), both of whom have long track records in historic preservation, have publicly debated the Portland Building's fate.

While Meijer argues that it's too soon for history to determine whether the building was a failure (postmodernism is now a thing of the past that few miss), Cavell, in a THA blog post, argues that the building "as constructed is not a representation of the design. The budget couldn’t support the details that gave richness to the building – materials were cheapened and details flattened to the point that the building is a caricature of the original intent – alarming, since the design sketches themselves are very gestural."

If gutting the interior and keeping the facade is not a good option (the small exterior windows are part of the problem - although the atrium could alleviate that), a reader of this blog suggested another option: that the city could tear down the Portland building and more or less rebuild it to something that more closely resembles Graves' quirky original design, only more soundly contructed this time. You could even get Graves to lead the redesign.

Indeed, while Graves is a famous name in architecture (as well as product design following his work for Target), he really was reportedly responsible for little beyond the building's exterior form. And as Cavell points out, that form was significantly altered from his original sketches.

But Cavell isn't arguing for demolition either. "I can trot out my cheap shots – the building’s only redeeming feature is the enormous sculpture 'Portlandia' that adorns its West elevation, that it faces the wrong way, that the blue tile reminds me of a public restroom. I can argue that it is an 'object' building that has complete disregard for the wellbeing of its occupants. But I understand that Graves’ Portland Building is a significant design from a particular moment in our architectural history," she writes.

"Maybe the solution – the win-win – is to retain its shell and to completely reimagine everything that happens within its four walls," Cavell concludes. "Now, that would make a great design studio project."

In traditional terms, the dramatic, bold and creative proposal for the long-vacant Burnside Bridgehead block can be described simply as an apartment tower sitting on a podium. But knowing it is Skylab Architecture design means there is absolutely nothing traditional about either major element. Jeff Kovel and a design team that seems allergic to 90-dgree corners hopes to build a 21-story building that will set a high standard for new inner-East Side projects.

Let’s start with the tower. It runs diagonally, angling - from northwest to southeast – across the block immediately north of the Burnside Bridge between Northeast 2nd and 3rd Avenues. The footprint of the tower is basically a parallelogram, but its sides pinch inward slightly on all four frontages to take better advantage of views up and down the Willamette River to the west and Cascade peaks to the east. The tower’s curtain wall of seemingly randomly-placed vertical glass and metal panels grows more glassine as the floors rise and metal panels decrease in number. A gently-angled parapet eliminates those boring 90-degree angles up top.

The geometric niceties of the tower are subtle compared with the bolder strokes of the five-story podium. Four levels will contain 200 parking spaces for apartment tenant and ground-floor space for retail use. The most dramatic element is a stair-stepped roof for the podium that reflects the 25-foot change in elevation on the site. Portions of the podium roof will provide outdoor meeting space for tenants and eco-roof plantings designed to mitigate storm-water runoff. The parking floors will be screened with perforated metal panels that will allow for natural ventilation. Purple lights near the garage edges will be activated by motion sensors, giving a muted “light show” effect as cars negotiate the parking floors at night.

Skylab's Block 67 proposal (rendering courtesy Skylab)

After four public hearings, the Portland Design Commission gave strong unanimous approval to the Skylab design on December 21. “Overall, it’s a fantastic project,” said Gwen Millius, the commission’s chair. “All very thoughtful and creative,” added David Wark, another commissioner. “It is definitely going to mark this place in a very creative way.” Wark added, “Hopefully, it will start moving forward very soon.”

Therein lies the rub. As close as it is to downtown Portland and the busy Central Eastside Industrial Area, Block 67 as it is known, has sat vacant since 1984. A developer in the 1980s hoped to add additional floors to the old Bridgeport Hotel that once occupied a portion of the block. But that plan died of financial collapse and remnants of the old building and a newer steel frame that once poked above the old hotel were demolished. For years, the Portland Development Commission tried to market a four-block renewal project immediately north of the Burnside Bridge, but talk of offices and even big-box retail led to nothing at all.

The city’s redevelopment agency ultimately agreed with Portland-based Beam Development to tackle the four-block site one block at a time, instead. Beam already has renovated the former Convention Plaza building immediately north of Block 67, once planned to be demolished, into approximately 100,000 square feet of office space. Beam is working with Key Development Corporation of Walnut, California, on the apartment building being designed by Skylab.

Skylab's Block 67 proposal (rendering courtesy Skylab)

Not all financial hurdles have been cleared yet for the Block 67 highrise. One key decision still pending is whether the structure will be a steel frame or a more expensive option of post-tensioned concrete. The shallower concrete floor plates would allow for 276 apartments in 16 floors above the podium and a total height of 206 feet. A steel frame would restrict the design to 13 stories above the podium, 222 apartments and a maximum height of 195 feet. Kovel believes the thinner concrete floors would be a more graceful fit with the glass and metal-panel window wall system. Design Commission members also preferred the post-tensioned option, but granted approval to either version.

Completion of the Skylab project likely would breathe new vitality into the inner East Side, as well as adding the first dramatic new building since the Rose Quarter and Oregon Convention Center projects. Wark said he thinks it will raise the bar for future East Side projects. “It’s just an incredibly exciting building,” said David Keltner, another Design Commission member. “This would be a great thing for the city.”